With elaborate preparations and a high quotient of luck, Sokurov made the film in a single afternoon, meandering nearly three quarters of a mile through the galleries, corridors and courtyards of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Sokurov used high definition digital video, later transferred to 35mm film, to record the longest shot in film history.

DEEPER ISSUES

But the viewer nearly loses sight of Sokurov's technical mastery as the film turns a stroll through Russia's greatest museum into a meditation on time,

history and the nature of cinema.

As the film's narrator tries to get his bearings in the past, he notices another outsider nosing around: a 19th century European diplomat, more surprised at finding himself speaking Russian than at being dislocated in time.

The diplomat (Sergei Dreiden) and the narrator can see each other. But the narrator passes almost unnoticed through the film's maze of interiors and episodes, while the diplomat interacts with people from several centuries.

At one point he comes upon Antonio Canova's marble "Three Graces" and recalls deliriously how his mother, also a sculptor, almost married Canova.

Moments later, he opens a door into a picture gallery filled with 21st century museumgoers.

Here the narrator recognizes two doctors he knows -- perhaps because they are of his time, they see him -- and he introduces them to the diplomat, with whom they have a fractured dialogue about Italian painting.

What we ordinarily call anachronism becomes the nature of time and history in Sokurov's cinematic vision.

The narrator and his companion witness Peter the Great -- who built the Winter Palace, kernel of the Hermitage complex -- as he humiliates a courtier in a subterranean room.

A spiral staircase leads backstage, from which they glide onstage, over the orchestra and into the seats as a few elite guests witness the premier of a play by Catherine the Great.

They intrude on a diplomatic ceremony in which Persian emissaries try to make amends for the the murder of the Russian legation. The diplomat opens the door on a bleak moment of madness during the Nazi siege of Leningrad (renamed St. Petersburg after 1991).

Later they follow Czarina Alexandra and a nun companion down a long corridor, as Alexandra voices fear that she's heard shots.

Even before the film's time-traveling witnesses see Nicholas II and Alexandra and their children sit down to a meal, the audience has begun to fear that the revolution or the World War will come crashing through the Hermitage walls. But it never does.

LAVISH SCENES

"Russian Ark" ends with a spectacular 1913 ball scene and an oceanic image that rhymes with, if it doesn't quite explain, the film's title.

"I'm no theoretician," Sokurov has said. But recall that the great Russian film theorists -- Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov -- saw meaning spring from the sequencing of shots, and the question arises whether the one-shot "Russian Ark" is Sokurov's rejoinder to them.

Are Sokurov's time-wanderers ghosts? Are they Russian "Flying Dutchmen"?

We never find out, but "Russian Ark" reminds us that as movie-viewers, we all behave like ghosts.